All the government units currently protecting Brazil’s uncontacted tribes from invasion by loggers and ranchers could be withdrawn, according to information leaked to Survival International. The move would constitute the biggest threat to uncontacted Amazon tribes for a generation.
Agents from FUNAI, the country’s indigenous affairs department, perform a vital role in protecting uncontacted territories from loggers, ranchers, miners and other invaders. Some teams are already being withdrawn, and further withdrawals are planned for the near future.
Thousands of invaders are likely to rush into the territories once protection is removed.
There are estimated to be over 100 uncontacted tribes in Brazil, well over two-thirds of the global population of uncontacted people. Many of them live in indigenous territories, which total over 54.3 million hectares of protected rainforest, an area about the size of France.
These territories are guarded by just 19 dedicated FUNAI teams. It is possible that all 19 teams could be eliminated from the Brazilian state budget, despite the fact that money spent maintaining these teams is equal to the average salaries and benefits paid to just two Brazilian congressmen per year.
The proposals are the latest in a long list of actions from the Temer government, which came to power in 2016 after the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, that could have catastrophic consequences for indigenous peoples.
Indigenous activist Sonia Guajajara said: “By cutting down the FUNAI budget, the government is declaring the extinction of indigenous people.”
Paulo Marubo, an indigenous man from the Javari Valley in Brazil’s Amazon said: “If the protection teams are withdrawn, it will be like before, when many Indians were massacred and died as a result of disease… If the loggers come here, they will want to contact the uncontacted, they will spread diseases and even kill them.”
Campaigners have suggested that the government’s close ties to Brazil’s powerful ranching and agribusiness lobbies – which consider indigenous territories to be a barrier to their own expansion – could be part of the reason for the proposal.
Major indigenous protests are taking place this week in Brasilia against government proposals to water down protection for indigenous rights.
Uncontacted tribes are the most vulnerable peoples on the planet. Whole populations are being wiped out by violence from outsiders who steal their land and resources, and by diseases like flu and measles to which they have no resistance.
Survival International is leading the global fight for uncontacted tribes’ right to their land, and to determine their own futures.
Survival’s Director Stephen Corry said: “Cuts in government budgets to protect uncontacted tribes are clearly nothing to do with money – the sums involved are tiny. It’s a political move from agribusiness which sees uncontacted tribes as a barrier to profit and is targeting rainforest which has been off-limits to development. The reality is these cuts could sanction genocide.”
There are far more humans in Park City than the land can support, so the necessities of life must be imported. Importing these necessities costs money and requires an industrial infrastructure. Park City makes its money through a tourist industry that relies on snow, but climate change, produced by the same industrial infrastructure bringing the necessities of life, is destroying the snow. The industrial infrastructure must be dismantled to stop climate change so the snow may survive. Either the snow or the industrial infrastructure will fail.
And, Park City will, too.
Not long after the essay was published, I attended a gathering for an emerging group PCAN! or Park City Action Network. The gathering’s goals included to “create a network for young professionals and build community, to learn what’s going on in local politics, and to find other like-minded individuals to create a strong collective voice.”
I think I’m still young (turned 30 in March), I have a law degree and license (in Wisconsin), and I’m interested in finding like-minded individuals to create a strong collective voice, so I went.
A man approached me, and said. “You’re Will Falk, right? You wrote that article?”
I was embarrassed and nervous people were going to hate me for what I wrote. But, his eyes and body language were sincere, so I told the truth. He asked, “So, you think Park City won’t last?
“Can’t physically last,” I clarified.
“ Right. And, solar power isn’t the answer? Wind power, either?”
“No,” I responded. He looked at me earnestly for a few seconds, looked around at the room of concerned, young professionals, and said, more to himself than to me, “Park City is still damned huh?”
“Still damned,” I said. He sighed and asked,“What the hell have we been working on all this time?”
I shrugged. I wasn’t sure what to say, but I could see acceptance in his face. I simply tried to meet his gaze. Finally, he asked, “What can I do?”
***
Park City’s vicious cycle is a reflection of the vicious cycle the global human population is caught in. There are far more humans than the planet can support sustainably, so the necessities of life must be stolen from non-humans and the future. This theft is managed through an industrial infrastructure powered by fossil fuels and the operation of this infrastructure is destroying the planet’s total life-supporting capacity. It is pushing the climate to temperatures too warm for most species, pushing oceanic life perilously close to total collapse, and contaminating, with toxins and carcinogens, the bodies of every civilized individual.
Unfortunately, with more than half the global human population now living in cities, most humans depend on this system for food, for clean water, and for shelter. Humans have backed themselves into a corner. If this system collapses, huge, urban populations of humans will be left without the necessities of life. But the system must collapse for the planet to survive. Ignorance of physical reality cannot save us from it; either the planet or the industrial infrastructure will fail.
Basic ecology gives us another way to understand this. In ecologic terms, humans have overshot the planet’s carrying capacity through dependence on a drawdown method of temporarily extending carrying capacity. Crash is inevitable, and the longer drawdown occurs, the smaller Earth’s total carrying capacity will be after the crash.
Humans are animals and, as animals, require habitat. Every habitat has a total life-supporting capacity, or carrying capacity. Carrying capacity is the maximum population of a given species which can be supported by a particular habitat indefinitely. Earth, even as the largest habitat, is finite with a specific carrying capacity.
In his ecological classic Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, Dr. William R. Catton Jr. explains that civilized humans “have several times succeeded in taking over additional portions of the earth’s total life-supporting capacity, at the expense of other creatures.”
Catton’s phrase “at the expense of other creatures” is a nice way of describing extermination. Using 1970 population totals and current trends, the World Wildlife Fund recently published a prediction that by 2020 two-thirds of the Earth’s total vertebrate population (mammals, birds, fish, amphibians, and reptiles) will have been killedby human activities. Biologist Paul Ehrlich, who studies population at Stanford University, says that half of all individual life forms humans are now aware of have already disappeared.
Civilized humans have learned to rely on technologies that augment human carrying capacity in temporary ways. These augmentations are necessarily temporary because the finiteness of every habitat places physical limits on population growth. In other words, you can’t steal more than everything.
The latest and deadliest of the technologies humans have used to augment carrying capacity revolve around the exploitation of the “planet’s energy savings deposits, fossil fuels.” Through these exploitative technologies powered by fossil fuels, Catton argues, civilized humans are now engaged in a “drawdown method of extending carrying capacity.” This method is “an inherently temporary expedient by which life opportunities for a species are temporarily increased by extracting from the environment for use by that species some significant fraction of an accumulate resource that is not being replaced as it is drawn down.”
Daly West and Quincy Mines in Park City (circa 1911) / Wikimedia
This drawdown has allowed humans to overshoot the planet’s carrying capacity. Overshoot leads to a situation where a portion, or even all, of a population cannot be supported when temporarily available, and finite, resources are exhausted. When these resources run out, crash inevitably follows.Civilized humans are destroying countless so-called “resources” that are not being replaced as they are murdered. The extraction of fossil fuels is an easy example. But, civilized humans are also cutting forests and plowing grasslands faster than they can grow back, they’re stripping topsoil faster than it rebuilds, and they’re heating the planet more intensely than life can evolve to keep pace.
Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, describes what is happening as the ecological phenomenon known as “population bloom” in his book The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality. When a species finds an abundant, easily acceptable energy source (in our case, fossil fuels), its numbers increase while taking advantage of the surplus energy. Speaking to the inevitability of crash, Heinberg writes, “In nature, growth always slams up against non-negotiable constraints sooner or later…Population blooms (or periods of rapid growth) are always followed by crashes and die-offs. Always.”
Crash following overshoot is bad enough, but the problem doesn’t end there. If a population exists in overshoot for too long, drawing down too many of its habitat’s necessities of life, the habitat’s carrying capacity can be permanently reduced. To use simple numbers, start with a carrying capacity of 1000 humans. What happens if 1200 humans, then 1500 humans, then 2000 humans live on the land for too long? Or those original 1000 humans steal other creatures’ carrying capacity and convert it to human use?
That land base’s carrying capacity can be permanently reduced to 800 humans, 400, and so on, over time, all the way to zero. Eventually, the population will crash and that land base will never be capable of supporting humans, or any other life, again. This is as true for the carrying capacity of a small locale like Park City as it is for the carrying capacity of the whole planet.
The horror we live with comes into focus. Most human lives are made possible by a system that will collapse, and the longer that system operates, literally eating Earth’s total carrying capacity, the less chance other lives – human and non-human – have to continue existing.
We have two choices. We can live in denial, even as the evidence of the planet’s murder piles around us. We can anesthetize ourselves with the comforts produced by this insane arrangement of power. We can pray for our own death before the worst of the collapse happens. In short, we can do nothing.
Or, accepting responsibility as people who love each other, love our non-human kin, and love life, we can stop the industrial system from destroying our beloveds.
Once you’ve decided to stand on the side of life, the question becomes, How? How do ensure as much life as possible will survive the coming crash? How do we stop industrial civilization from permanently reducing the planet’s carrying capacity to nil?
***
Longtime environmental activists and writers Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Aric McBay created a concrete strategy for an effective resistance movement in their book Deep Green Resistance. They named that strategy “Decisive Ecological Warfare (DEW).”
Before you object to the term “warfare,” consider this: In the past, wars killed humans. Today, with human activities killing 200 species daily, we are engaged in a war where whole species are exterminated. We readily recognize the chemical warfare characterizing so many conflicts of the last century and, today, industrial processes create a reality where every mother on the planet now has dioxin, a known carcinogen,in her breast milk.
This is a war. And, we are losing. Badly. If we’re going to win this war, we need to act like a serious resistance movement.
DEW gives us a comprehensive strategy. It is centered on two primary goals. Goal 1 is “to disrupt and dismantle industrial civilization; to thereby remove the ability of the powerful to exploit the marginalized and destroy the planet.” Goal 2 is “to defend and rebuild just, sustainable, and autonomous human communities, and, as part of that, to assist in the recovery of the land.”
Disrupting and dismantling industrial civilization is primary. If industrial civilization is not stopped, then the second goal will be impossible. The land will be pushed past its ability to recover and there will be too few necessities of life left to support autonomous human communities.
Accomplishing these goals will involve five smaller strategies. First, resisters will “engage in direct militant actions against industrial infrastructure.” This may frighten some people and others may feel physically incapable of actions like these. If you can’t engage in these kinds of actions, the people who can will need your material support. In a place like Park City, steeped in privilege, the most obvious form of support the community could offer is money. Those in power are incredibly well-funded. We’ll never match them dollar for dollar. But, that doesn’t mean money can’t be put to good use.
Second, they will “aid and participate in ongoing social and ecological justice struggles; promote equality and undermine exploitation by those in power.” My friend Rachel Ivey, a brilliant feminist writer and organizer, often connects social and ecological justice with the truth that, “Oppression is always tied to resource extraction.” This means that industrial civilization has been built on the backs of people of color, indigenous peoples, the poor, and women. These groups are often on the movement’s front lines, fighting for survival. We must join them in true solidarity.
Third, they will “defend the land and prevent expansion of industrial logging, mining, construction, and so on, such that more intact land and species will remain when civilization does collapse.” Pipeline and port blockades, tree sits, and other forms of non-violent direct action aimed at physically preventing those in power from destroying more of the land is an essential piece of the puzzle. There are roles in the resistance for pacifists and others personally and philosophically unwilling to engage in more militant actions.
Fourth, they will “build and mobilize resistance organizations that will support the above activities, including decentralized training, recruitment, logistical support, and so on.” A serious resistance movement needs artists, writers, and those skilled in marketing and mass media communications. It also needs quartermasters, organizational psychologists, and others trained in logistical thinking.
Finally, resisters will “rebuild a sustainable subsistence base for human societies (including perennial polycultures for food) and localized, democratic communities that uphold human rights.” As collapse intensifies, we are going to need permaculturists, gardeners, and urban farmers to produce food when the industrial networks, currently transporting food, fail.
All kinds of skills will be necessary to stop industrial civilization, but the most important thing is that industrial civilization is actually stopped. All of our efforts must support this primary goal. Right now, the dominant system is barreling down a path that ends in total ecological collapse. Not only is the human species endangered with extinction, but every species – save, maybe a few microscopic species of bacteria – is threatened with annihilation. Before anything else, we must knock the dominant system off that path.
***
I return to answering the question, “What can I do?”
This is the wrong question. Don’t ask, “What can I do?” Instead ask, “What needs to be done?”
Go outside. Look around. Take a deep breath. Feel the oxygen, exhaled by trees, seep into your lungs. Let your breath go, and listen as the trees inhale the carbon dioxide your breath releases. Ask those trees what they need.
Climb to the top of the nearest hill. Find a boulder to sit on and wait. Match the land’s patience. Let gravity pull your bones closer to their ancestors, the bones of the earth. Watch the ants march, dutifully performing work for their community. Listen to the geese arriving for the spring, celebrating their return. Ask the stones, the ants, and the geese what they need. Ask them what needs to be done.
They’ll tell you they need to live.
The trees will tell you that warming temperatures cause cavitation, or bubbles, in the water flowing from their roots to their topmost leaves and that these bubbles kill them as surely as artery blockages kill humans.
The stones will tell you how quickly everything has changed. They will tell you how species they used to watch disappeared faster than stones, who exist on geologic time, can contemplate. They will tell you about mountain top removal, open-pit mining, and earthquakes caused by fracking.
The ants will tell you how they’ve long been involved in planetary cooling processes. They’ll show you how they’re working as hard as they can to build limestone by freeing calcium carbonate from minerals in the soil. And, in the process, trapping as much carbon dioxide as they can.
The geese will tell you of frantic searches for disappearing wetlands, of once wild rivers dammed, drying, and no longer flowing to the sea.
When you stop asking “what can I do?” to begin asking “what needs to be done?” it is true, you may expose yourself to a world in pain. But, you’ll also find countless allies asking the same questions you are. You may rip the scar tissue of denial that has been shielding your eyes from the near-blinding truth. But, once you let the sunlight in, once you step outside into the real world, you’ll open yourself to a world fighting like hell to survive.
We’ve been waiting for you.
Will Falk moved to the West Coast from Milwaukee, WI where he was a public defender. His first passion is poetry and his work is an effort to record the way the land is speaking. He feels the largest and most pressing issue confronting us today is the destruction of natural communities. He received a Society of Professional Journalists, San Diego Chapter, 2016 Journalism award. He is currently living in Utah.
TUCSON, Ariz.— The Center for Biological Diversity and Congressman Raúl M. Grijalva, who serves as ranking member of the House Committee on Natural Resources, today sued the Trump administration over the proposed border wall and other border security measures, calling on federal agencies to conduct an in-depth investigation of the proposal’s environmental impacts.
Today’s suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona, is the first targeting the Trump administration’s plan to vastly expand and militarize the U.S.-Mexico border, including construction of a “great wall.”
“Trump’s border wall will divide and destroy the incredible communities and wild landscapes along the border,” said Kierán Suckling, the Center’s executive director.
“Endangered species like jaguars and ocelots don’t observe international boundaries and should not be sacrificed for unnecessary border militarization. Their survival and recovery depends on being able to move long distances across the landscape and repopulate places on both sides of the border where they’ve lived for thousands of years.”
The lawsuit seeks to require the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Customs and Border Protection to prepare a supplemental “programmatic environmental impact statement” for the U.S.-Mexico border enforcement program.
The program includes Trump’s proposed wall as well as road construction, off-road vehicle patrols, installation of high-intensity lighting, construction of base camps and checkpoints, and other activities. These actions significantly impact the borderlands environment stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, which is home to millions of people, endangered species like jaguars and Mexican gray wolves, and protected federal lands like Big Bend National Park and Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument.
“American environmental laws are some of the oldest and strongest in the world, and they should apply to the borderlands just as they do everywhere else,” Grijalva said. “These laws exist to protect the health and well-being of our people, our wildlife, and the places they live. Trump’s wall — and his fanatical approach to our southern border — will do little more than perpetuate human suffering while irrevocably damaging our public lands and the wildlife that depend on them.”
Congressman Grijalva’s district is the largest Congressional district in Arizona and includes approximately 300 miles of the U.S./Mexico border.
If successful, today’s lawsuit would require the Trump administration to undertake a comprehensive review of the social, economic and environmental costs of the border wall.
Background
The National Environmental Policy Act requires that federal agencies conduct environmental review of a major federal action or program that significantly affects the quality of the human environment.
The Immigration and Naturalization Service — the precursor to the Department of Homeland Security — last updated the “programmatic environmental impact statement” for the U.S.-Mexico border enforcement program in 2001. That review identified the potential impacts of border enforcement operations, including limited border wall construction, on wildlife and endangered species in particular as a significant issue. The 2001 analysis was intended to be effective for five years but has never been updated.
In the 16 years since, the U.S.-Mexico border enforcement program and associated environmental impacts have expanded well beyond the predictions of that document, with deployment of thousands of new border agents, construction of hundreds of miles of border walls and fences, construction and reconstruction of thousands of miles of roads, installation of base camps and other military and security infrastructure, among numerous other actions.
During that same time, scientific understanding of the impacts of border walls and other border enforcement activities on wildlife and endangered species including jaguars, ocelots, Mexican gray wolves and cactus ferruginous pygmy owls has advanced significantly. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has also designated “critical habitat” under the Endangered Species Act within 50 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border for more than 25 species since the outdated 2001 analysis was prepared.
Meanwhile, the number of undocumented migrants moving through the southwestern borderlands is at a historic low, and the border is more secure than it’s ever been.
Survival International has learned that politicians from a notoriously violent town in Brazil are lobbying behind the scenes to open up the territory of a vulnerable uncontacted tribe.
Councilors from Colniza in central Brazil, which is dominated by illegal logging and ranching and for years was Brazil’s most violent town, have met the Minister of Justice to lobby for the Rio Pardo indigenous territory to be drastically reduced in size. The minister is reportedly sympathetic to the councilors’ proposals.
Their plan is for road-builders, loggers, ranchers and soya farmers to move in, despite the territory being home to the last of the Kawahiva tribe, one of the most vulnerable peoples on the planet.
The Kawahiva depend entirely on the rainforest for survival, and have been on the run from loggers and other invaders for years.
The Rio Pardo territory was only recognized in 2016, following a global campaign by Survival International and pressure within Brazil.
Thousands of Survival supporters contacted the then-Minister of Justice demanding action. Oscar-winning actor and Survival ambassador Sir Mark Rylance fronted a major media push, culminating in the signing of the decree that should have secured the Indians’ territory for good.
Now, however, vested interests in the region could undo much of that progress.
Survival’s Director Stephen Corry said: “Brazil must respect the rights of its tribal peoples. Uncontacted peoples, like the Kawahiva, clearly want to be left alone and to live as they please. But Brazil’s current leaders are holding closed-door meetings with corrupt politicians, and kowtowing to the agribusiness lobby, expressly to deny them that right. The stakes could not be higher – entire peoples are facing genocide as a result of this callous approach.”
Background briefing
The Kawahiva are hunter-gatherers, who migrate from camp to camp through the Rio Pardo rainforest.
Roads, ranches and logging all risk exposing them to violence from outsiders who steal their lands and resources, and to diseases like flu and measles to which they have no resistance.
All uncontacted tribal peoples face catastrophe unless their land is protected. Survival International is leading the global fight to secure their land for them, and to give them the chance to determine their own futures.
The current Brazilian government is attempting to roll back decades of gradual progress in the recognition of indigenous peoples’ rights in the country. The Minister of Justice recently said: “Enough of all this talk of land [demarcation] – land doesn’t fill anyone’s stomach.” And the new head of Indigenous Affairs Department FUNAI has said “Indians can’t be ‘fixed in time.’”
I was asked to speak about the state of the planet, and to do it in under five minutes. I can do it in three.
The world is being murdered, flayed alive, poisoned, gutted, dismembered.
Every biological indicator is going the wrong direction.
And it’s getting worse by the day.
Two hundred species were driven extinct today, and they were my brothers and sisters. Two hundred will go extinct tomorrow. And the day after.
There are stolid scientists who are saying the oceans could be devoid of fish in less than 35 years.
Imagine that: the murder of the oceans on this water planet.
The problems are not new. This culture has been killing the planet for 6000 to 10000 years. When we think of Iraq, is the first thing we think of cedar forests so thick the sunlight never reached the ground? That’s how it was, prior to this culture. The first written myth of this culture is Gilgamesh deforesting the hills and valleys of Iraq to make a great city. The Arabian peninsula was heavily forested. The forests of North Africa were cut to make the Egyptian and Phoenician navies. Greece was heavily forested.
Forests precede us and deserts dog our heels.
And not every culture has destroyed their landbases. The Chumash lived here for at least 13000 years, and when the Europeans arrived here, the place was an ecological paradise. Likewise where I live the Tolowa lived there for at least 12500 years, and likewise when the Europeans arrived the place was a paradise. No longer.
A dear doctor friend of mine always says that the first step toward proper treatment is diagnosis. If we refuse to diagnose the problems our actions will never resolve them.
The problems are not soluble by tweaking processes. The problems are inherent in how we perceive the world, how we interact with the world, what we value, and they are functional and inherent to this culture’s economy. What is GNP? It’s a measure of how quickly the living planet is turned into dead products. Trees into two-by-fours, living rivers into kilowatts, schools of fish into fish sticks.
This is not cognitively challenging. We would all understand this if we weren’t from early childhood inculcated into believing that the economy is more important than life, if we weren’t taught that what humans create has meaning and what the world creates does not, that humans have sentience and meaningful lives, and nonhumans and natural communities do not.
But what if this is all wrong? What if life is not a game of monopoly or risk where the point is to run the board, but rather life is a symphony, where the point is to learn your proper role, and play it at the proper time? The point is not for violin players to kill the oboe players and convert them into cash, but rather to make beautiful music together.
The only measure by which we will be judged by those humans and nonhumans who come after presuming any remain will be the health of the earth. They’re going to care about whether the earth can support life.
At this point in the murder of the planet, there is I think really only one question worth asking: is the world a better place because you were born, and because of your life and because of what you do? That is very possible to do. Think about it: how did the world get to be so glorious and beautiful and fecund in the first place? By everyone living and dying. Salmon make forests better places by living and dying. So do redwood trees and lampreys and banana slugs. That’s how life works. So, the question that the world needs for us to live is: especially given that this culture is killing the planet, how do we individually and collectively make the world a better place by our lives and deaths. By our actions. The planet, not the culture. And that is as true for any organization or corporation as it is for any of us individually. How do we make the real, physical still fecund world that is our only home, better, for hammerhead sharks, for coho salmon, for giant anteaters, for Mekong catfish, Amani flatwings, cayman islands ghost orchids, and orangutans, and the larger communities they call home.
